Filling in the Gaps: The Nikon Coolpix S4

Filling in the Gaps: The Nikon Coolpix S4

A few years ago I came across a YouTube video (https://youtu.be/g9dOFdw33Jg?si=qtMt-zcHM_xqejP6) about the Nikon Coolpix 900, an unusual looking camera from 1998. It was nothing particularly  special for it's time, but what made this camera different was its swivel lens. You could literally rotate the lens around the body by nearly 360°.

Well, of course my mind was blown by this and I just had to get one of these little  beasties. Sadly they rarely become available, and when they do the models are either terribly expensive or broken (and still expensive). However, I did manage to get some others in the range, the Coolpix 990 and the Coolpix 4500, and I am always looking out for more.

So I was really delighted to spot a Nikon Coolpix S4 on the Kamerastore website. I hadn't realised there were any swivel lens models after the Coolpix 4500 was released in 2002, but a quick look on Wikipedia showed that the S4 was released in 2005 and the S10 a year later. It appears my search is not over.

The Coolpix S4 was introduced by Nikon in 2005. It has a 6MP CCD sensor and shutter speeds of 2s - 1/1000s. The ISO range is a meagre 50 - 400. Like its older brethren it features a rotating lens, but this time it's housed in a silver body, like the Coolpix 900 and not the chunky black body of the other cameras in the series.

Of course, my first outing with the Coolpix S4 was to my favourite tree and well across the road. As well as a regular colour image I also used colour and infrared filters to make trichromes and digital aerochromes. I couldn't figure out how switch the S4 to black and white mode, I'm not even sure if you can, so I used the colour filters and later desaturated the colour images in GuIMP before combining the layers for trichromes and aerochromes.

The regular colour image came out quite nicely, but things got really interesting with infrared and colour filters. The straight colour infrared image was quite nice, though it was a little dark with a maximum exposure of 2s. When the image was enhanced it was full of noise (and I reckon a fair number of dead pixels), and channel mixing the colour infrared image was really trippy.

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